Hall of Gestures

PROPERTY OF THE MIT PRESS | UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS FOR PROOFREADING, INDEXING, AND PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES ONLY ENERGIES IN THE ARTS EDITED BY DOUGLAS KAHN THE MIT PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND 11855.indb 3 11/5/18 6:54 PM PROPERTY OF THE MIT PRESS | UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS FOR PROOFREADING, INDEXING, AND PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES ONLY © 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Chaparral Pro by The MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kahn, Douglas, 1951- editor. Title: Energies in the arts / edited by Douglas Kahn. Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018020784 | ISBN 9780262039383 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Arts —Philosophy. | Force and energy—Philosophy. Classification: LCC BH39 .E559 2019 | DDC 700.1/08--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020784 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11855.indb 4 11/5/18 6:54 PM PROPERTY OF THE MIT PRESS | UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS FOR PROOFREADING, INDEXING, AND PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES ONLY 11855.indb 192 11/5/18 6:55 PM PROPERTY OF THE MIT PRESS | UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS FOR PROOFREADING, INDEXING, AND PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES ONLY 6 LEROI-GOURHAN’S HALL OF GESTURES JOHN TRESCH THROWN, POSED WITH STRIKER In 1999 I visited the Musee de l’homme— the Museum of Man, the temple to humanity at the Place du Trocadéro in Paris; I’m sure of the year because look- ing across the Seine from the museum’s café, “Le Totem,” I saw an electric-light display on the Eiffel Tower counting down the days to the millennium. I knew some of the history of the place: James Clifford’s “On Ethnographic Surrealism” and works by Jean Jamin explained how the Neo-Moorish Trocadéro Palace formerly standing on this site—with its African, Asian, and Native American oddities and antiquities—had been a meeting place for anthropologists and avant-garde provocateurs in Jazz Age Paris; it was replaced by the monumental modernist Chaillot Palace and its more scientistic vision of a universal science of humankind. I’d also been reading Walter Benjamin’s musings, inspired by Baudelaire and the Surrealists, about the ecstatic charge buried in Paris’s forgot- ten passageways.1 The visit felt like a pilgrimage to a holy site of French theory. I gawped at the grand entrance hall, its spiral staircases, curved interior walls, giant windows, and iconic objects: bones and skulls, an Easter Island head, cases full of textiles and baskets from around the world. That the museum’s displays appeared dated—there were few television screens, no animatronics, only de- crepit mannequins and black-and-white photos captioned in mid-century modern type—only added to their charm. One display in particular mesmerized me. It featured hand tools from nu- merous countries, with photos of men and women at work, next to outlined drawings of their poses and gestures. Coated in a thrift-store patina like docu- ments of an alien past, they were labeled with the name of the gesture and its description: for instance, “Thrown,” and “Posed with Striker” (see figure 6.1). 11855.indb 193 11/5/18 6:55 PM PROPERTY OF THE MIT PRESS | UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS FOR PROOFREADING, INDEXING, AND PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES ONLY John Tresch FIGURE 6.1 Leroi-Gourhan’s Hall of MuséeGestures de l’Homme, 1999. Photograph by the author. Perhaps because I was so primed to experience the museum’s aura, these strangely stylized images of “percussion” struck and resonated. The concentra- tion of the laborers and the doubling of each gesture somehow invited identifica- tion, a projection of my own sensorimotor corporeality into the empty spaces inside the lines. The images seemed to demonstrate in a lost idiom the alchemi- cal process of theory. A particular, embodied instance was abstracted into dy- namic outlines and assigned a taxonomic tag, wedging it into some unknown, presumably vast systematic edifice. The photos I snapped of these images re- mained a puzzling, eerie trace. I tried to visit the Museum of Man again years later, but it had closed for renovation in 2009. It reopened in 2015, with much of its ethnographic material 194 JOHN TRescH 11855.indb 194 11/5/18 6:55 PM PROPERTY OF THE MIT PRESS | UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS FOR PROOFREADING, INDEXING, AND PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES ONLY transferred to the Quai Branly Museum and the Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean in Marseilles. The remaining collection was reor- ganized to emphasize human biology.2 The paired photos and outlines, no longer on display, are preserved in the digital archives of the Quai Branly Museum. There I learned that they were made under the guidance of the anthropologist of technology, André Leroi-Gourhan, for the Hall of Arts and Techniques (Salle des arts et techniques), which served as the centerpiece for the Museum of Man—an important, but neglected aspect of a museum whose birth and development have been studied obsessively by historians of the French human sciences.3 In this chapter I seek to shed light on these peculiar images by placing them back in their earlier settings—the origin of the museum, and the successive regimes of art and energy with which they intersected. In this way I hope to provide a historical account for their disorienting impact, the “profane illumination” they provoked. I do not claim that these surreal effects were entirely intentional. Unlike other anthropologists of his generation (including Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, Marcel Griaule, and André Schaeffner), as well as the influential philosopher and para-sociologist, Georges Bataille, Leroi-Gourhan appears to have had minimal contact with the surrealis- tic avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s, and little interest in aesthetic provocation. On the contrary, his analyses—an anthropology that is also a technography— were in many ways emblematic of the scientistic, universalizing, and totalizing ambitions of the Museum of Man when it was installed at the International Exposition of Arts and Techniques in Modern Life of 1937. Far from sharing in the Surrealists’ antipathy toward scientific explanations and the regimenta- tion of official museums, Leroi-Gourhan devoted his life to building theoretical and institutional frameworks for the human sciences. He trained dozens of eth- nologists, archeologists, paleoanthropologists, and museum workers through a nearly forty-year collective pedagogical program run from the Museum of Man; he held France’s second professorial chair of ethnology, and entered the Collège de France in 1969.4 Despite this career as a faithful state functionary of human science, his museum displays and the arguments that informed them retain a compelling, subversive force.5 His works have been approached largely through his ideas and words; but as he himself argued for the primacy of bodies, actions, and objects, a fuller and more accurate image of his “technography” can be conveyed through analyzing the museum displays that embodied his thought. They tell a story of art and energy. At the entrance to the Hall of Arts and Techniques hung a sign in French: “Techniques are creative in the same sense as art. No art can do without LEROI-GoURHAN’S HALL OF GestURES 195 11855.indb 195 11/5/18 6:55 PM PROPERTY OF THE MIT PRESS | UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS FOR PROOFREADING, INDEXING, AND PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES ONLY technique.” It presented both utilitarian and aesthetic techniques—tools, ma- chines, and weapons, alongside sculpture, music, and dance. Central to Leroi- Gourhan’s analysis of these technical arts was their capture of “motive force”: the energies of living bodies, air, water, and fire, and eventually, petroleum, elec- tricity, and atomic fission.6 His work crossed paths with other attempts to reckon the relationships be- tween art and energy in twentieth-century France. This chapter walks through concentric rings of this historical labyrinth before arriving at the central cham- ber, the Hall of Arts and Techniques. For Surrealists and anthropologists of the 1920s and 30s, uncanny juxtapositions of high and low, modern and archaic—whether in paintings, collages, magazines, or museum displays—aimed to stimulate and unleash psychic and emotional energies. In the International Exposition of 1937, opposed visions of the political order and energy of indus- trial modernity were given aesthetic, propagandistic form. After the war, attempts to measure and guide human progress focused on the use and allotment of energy, connecting cave art and atomic destruction. In several of these contexts, Bataille’s writings offer useful points of com- parison with Leroi-Gourhan’s. Though Bataille—who perhaps more than any other figure realized a prewar and postwar fusion of philosophy, human science, and the transgressive aesthetics of the avant-garde—might appear the more radical thinker, Leroi-Gourhan walked the same paths. In the guise of a patient scientific vocation, his work performed a discreet but profound subver- sion of typical understandings of the human intellect and modernity, guided by Bergsonian intuitions. It inscribed a radical new humanism—reposing not on reason, rights, or even biology strictly understood, but on open-ended ten- dencies and evanescent gestures. Fueled the anti-fascist commitments of the Museum of Man in 1937, his work holds a lantern to the fissures of our time. STUMBLING OVER THE ARCHAIC The Museum of Ethnography in the Trocadéro Palace was first built for the 1898 International Exposition.7 Holding in haphazard splendor the “bric-à-brac” from cultures worldwide, it helped inspire the primitivism of Parisian arts in the 1920s.

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